radfrac_archive_full

I admit I have difficulty telling whether Melville is being sarcastic.

(Sargasso, I almost typed. Are you sincere, sir, or are you being sargasso?)

Nor, considered aright, does it seem any argument in favour of the gradual extinction of the sperm-whale, for example, that in former years (the latter part of the last century, say) these Leviathans, in small pods, were encountered much oftener than at present .... because, as has been elsewhere noticed, these whales, influenced by some views to safety, now swim the seas in immense caravans, so that to a large degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and pods, and schools of other days are now aggregated into vast by widely separated, unfrequent armies (472).

I wonder if this is true. It is an enormously tragic image -- yes, ha, whale, enormous, but then yes, again, enormous, ocean-spanning, a tragedy on a scale above the human and therefore difficult for us to imagine clearly. These pods, families, civilizations (because they are, if we admit it, civilizations, aren't they? Monuments or no monuments) huddling together in the sea for safety -- but there was no safety. And Melville's hubris is a different kind of hubris from the arrogance of kings -- the hubris of the small creature who thinks "I cannot possibly damage this enormous world." Utter confidence in your inability to do harm.

Melancholy reading, this novel, in itself and in retrospect. Not what I expected. The plot is almost irrelevant -- Ahab appears on maybe eight pages in each hundred? It's all about the attempt to calculate the incalculable whale.

{rf}